Despite increasing exposure to flooding and associated financial damages, estimates suggest more than two-thirds of flood-exposed properties are currently uninsured. This low adoption rate could undermine the climate resilience of communities and weaken the financial solvency of the United States National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). We study whether repeated exposure to flood events, especially disaster-scale floods expected to become more frequent in a warming climate, could spur insurance adoption. Using improved estimates of residential insurance take-up in locations where such insurance is voluntary, and exploiting variation in the frequency and severity of flood events over time, we quantify how flood events impact local insurance demand. We find that a flood disaster declaration in a given year increases the take-up rate of insurance by 7% in the following year, but the effect diminishes in subsequent years and is gone after five years. This effect is more short-lived in counties in inland states that do not border the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. The effect of a flood on takeup is substantially larger if there was also a flood in the previous year. We also find that recent disasters are more salient for homeowners whose primary residences are exposed to a disaster declaration compared to non-primary residences. Our results provide a more comprehensive understanding of the salience effect of flooding on insurance demand compared to previous studies. Overall, these findings suggest that relying on households to self-adapt to increasing flood risks in a changing climate is insufficient for closing the insurance protection gap.

In this presentation, we report on a comprehensive and balanced assessment of the relationship between climate and conflict risks and its implications for future directions of research. Research findings on the relationship between climate and conflict are diverse and contested. Based on the judgments of experts representing a broad range of disciplines and analytical approaches, we have assessed current understanding. The assessment is structured around the importance of climate as a driver of organized armed conflict within countries, changes in conflict risk across climate futures, and implications for conflict risk reduction and climate change adaptation. Across experts, best estimates are that 3–20% of conflict risk over the last century has been influenced by climate, and none of their individual ranges excludes a role of climate in 10% of conflict risk to date. There is agreement that climate variability and change shape the risk of organized armed conflict within countries. However, other drivers are judged substantially more influential for conflict overall, and the mechanisms of climate–conflict linkages are a key uncertainty. Intensifying climate change is estimated to increase future conflict risk as additional linkages become relevant, although uncertainties also expand. Synoptic understanding of the climate–conflict relationship is important even if climate’s role is relatively minor among the drivers of conflict. Given that conflict has pervasive detrimental human, economic, and environmental consequences, climate–conflict linkages, even if minor, would significantly influence the social costs of carbon and decisions to limit future climate change. The assessment has pointed to the different ways climate may interact with the major drivers of conflict risk. Crosscutting priorities for future directions of research include (1) deepening insight into climate–conflict linkages and conditions under which they manifest, (2) ambitiously integrating research designs, (3) systematically exploring future risks and response options, responsive to ongoing decision-making, and (4) evaluating the effectiveness of interventions to manage climate–conflict links. The implications of this expanding scientific domain unfold in real time.